Share this with

David Byrne doing on two wheels what Haruki Murakami did so well on two legs with his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running would be a good idea for a book.

This is not that book, though: the former Talking Head does take his fold-up bike around the world but his trips are the mere starting point for lofty, rather boring discussions on the cities he’s in.

Bicycle Diaries

The tangential idea – to talk of globalisation, art, politics and architecture – is interesting but there’s no narrative driving things along and it feels like the chatty blog-made-into-a-book Byrne claims in the acknowledgements he was keen to avoid.